Interview with JAJAH’s Daniel Mattes on the eve of their deal with Yahoo!

byaleconApril 29, 2008

Thought JAJAH was old news? Think again. Having attracted a whopping 10 million users in the last two years, up from 2 million just last year, they’re now expanding their business in dramatically new directions with the launch of JAJAH Managed Services. JAJAH co-founder Daniel Mattes explained it to me as a turnkey telephony service, with everything from network services to billing incorporated in the package. And their first customer? None other than Yahoo!, who will outsource voice services for their 97 million Yahoo IM users to JAJAH.

The completeness of the platform is apparent in the diagram below (click to enlarge). With services ranging from SMS to payments, to fraud detection, and IVR, JAJAH has provided a soup-to-nuts telecom service that can be delivered in part or as a complete solution.

When I compared JAJAH’s platform to Ribbit, asking if they were competitors, Mattes demurred. In keeping with how they are positioning JAJAH Managed Services as a suite of services that partners can pick and choose from according to their needs, he described Ribbit as a toolkit for creating front end systems, and invited the Ribbit team to use JAJAH’s network for their backend services.

JAJAH’s network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN. I’ve tried it myself, and the claim rings true.

This is a brilliant move. Congratulations Jajah. As telephony and voice continue to migrate to next generation, IP based solutions, infrastructure will play an ever increasing role. Jajah engineers have built a robust back-end to support Jajah’s growth. It makes total sense to make it available to other players.